Coincidently, a couple of days after I had posted the blog entry about spammers now targeting cell phones, I received a couple of unsolicited text messages. I don’t really use texting, since I have a Blackberry and prefer email and IM instead. Consequently I don’t subscribe to any texting plan. I had previously made a mental note to check what anti-spam tools my cell carrier – Verizon – had available to control the inbound text message stream. Now was a good time to follow-up on that.

Sure enough, there is a section called Text Blocking on the VerizonWireless customer portal. I assume that the cell carriers are just as motivated to control text-message spam, since they will have to deal with the undesired system load and resulting customer complaints.

The settings are straightforward. In my case, I simply disabled all messages that are sent as email or originate from the web. I figured it is OK. to receive messages from other cell phones, since the sender has to pay for the text-message as well.

I am sure the other cell carriers have similar tools in place. Perhaps now is a good time to check your text-message settings.

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